COVID-19 and techno-solutionism: responsibilization without contextualization?

Since the onset of the pandemic, and underpinned by often promissory undertones in policy discourse, an array of technological solutions have come to be regarded as privileged modes of intervention to curb the spread of COVID-19. Yet all too often the policies around COVID technologies have suffered from a spectrum of shortcomings or ‘fallacies’ (Jasanoff et al., 2021), which, notwithstanding the distinctiveness of each country’s policies, have characterized the pandemic response of most (liberal) democracies globally. In particular, the rollout of COVID interventions in many countries has tended to replicate a mode of intervention based on ‘technological fixes’ and ‘silver-bullet solutions’, which tend to erase contextual factors and marginalize other rationales, values, and social functions that do not explicitly support technology-based innovation efforts (Jasanoff et al., 2021). As Hill et al. (2022) in this Special Section argue, driving public health policy through such techno-solutionism only risks exacerbating existing social inequalities and mistrust in governments.